Many enterprise level entities have, for a number of years, outsourced various information technology (IT) services to companies which provide and manage data centers. Such data centers can, for example, configure, manage, upgrade and provide other outsourced IT services relative to hardware and software which are needed by such entities to perform the numerous IT tasks which keep their respective businesses operating. Such services include network management, server setup and maintenance, server upgrades, network security, and a host of other services.
Conventionally, interaction with data centers was not highly automated. When a data center's customer wanted to, for example, modify the network configuration of the system which was being provided to them on an outsourced basis by a data center, it was common for someone in the customer's IT department to contact the data center either via telephone, email or via a portal where the customer would sign in with credentials to request the change. A change ticket was established pursuant to the data center's established procedures, the ticket placed in a processing queue and the modifications would then be implemented by data center personnel in due course.
Additionally, the physical hardware which embodied the IT resources/services which were provided to a data center's customers typically were purchased by the data center for a particular customer and allocated directly to that customer. With the advent of cloud computing, which provides (among other things) a disassociation between physical hardware and specific users of that hardware, as well as a greater potential for customers to scale their IT processing bandwidth needs based on a variety of factors such as cost, time of day, etc., customers of data centers also desire more direct control over their outsourced network management services.